Ecblank.gif and web standards

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I’m having a hard time trying to get a site certified as AA compliant adhering to correct HTML. The main issue I am now facing is in an embedded categorised view with the html from a categorised row…

There are a few issues with this including no closing / and use of the deprecated border so is there any way I can get rid of this beastie in a categorised view? - BTW, removing it post display using JS won’t help sorry.

Thanks in anticipation

Ewen

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Subject: ecblank.gif and web standards

I prefer to not mix up terminology: This is “correct” HTML as per HTML 4.01 specification. Also, I’m not aware of what guideline might require a single img tag to end in “/>”.

However, the core of the problem is, that there’s not much you can do about it, as long as you let Domino render the view. You can play around with view settings like to not display documents in a hierarchy (if not required), which will get rid of some unnecessary ecblank.gifs. Also don’t check the box to display a twisty, if a row is expandable.

Still, if you need full control over the HTML generated, you have to either switch the view to be treated as HTML and provide all the tags yourself or replace the embedded view with a computed text or computed for display field, building the HTML using @DbLookup or @DbColumn. The latter will restrict you to 64 kiB of data to be returned.

In general, ecblank.gif and the way Domino generates HTML for views are a pain in the arm, but it surely was “compatible” (in the sence of “looks very similar”) with IE and NN, back then …

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Subject: RE: ecblank.gif and web standards

Thank you very much Harkpabst and Stan - excellent responses as per usual.

Unfortunately, we have to “validate” our pages through a system which is failing our code for reasons that are not correct. It means a very long winded document to ask for an exemption to the rule and several months of meetings and I was hoping that there was a way to remove the ecblank.gif image to avoid the issue.

Thanks once again

Ewen

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Subject: RE: ecblank.gif and web standards

Well, good luck to you. While it is relatively easy to recreate simple, flat views as pass-through HTML (so you have full control over what is sent to the browser), those simple, flat views tend to suffer the least from ecblank.gif. On the other hand, more complex categorized views, maybe even showing different levels of responses, which are flooded with ecblank.gif, are very, very hard to recreate with full fidelity.

So, unfortunately, there is no easy way around it in this case. You have to judge for yourself what was going to result in less pain: Going through the exception approval process, or recreating view functionality as pure HTML.

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Subject: ecblank.gif and web standards

First off, HTML doesn’t use a “/” to close tags that aren’t containers (that is, tags that don’t comprise an opening tag followed by content followed by a separate closing tag). That’s XHTML, which (although it looks somewhat similar) is a whole different beast. Note that in order to include a “/” in a standalone tag (like
,

or ) in HTML, you need to add artificial white space to the tag content in order to avoid it being interpreted as an illegal tag. Adding the “/” where it doesn’t belong is nothing more than developer vanity.

Deprecated is not forbidden, merely deprecated. The presence or absence of a border attribute will not affect accessibility or standards-compliance certification. Nor will the presence of a spacer image, provided that no misleading alternate text is associated with the image.

If you want complete control over the HTML that a view presents, you’ll need to write all of the HTML yourself and use the “Treat view content as HTML” option for web access.